The Reconstruction of Harry Potter
by KatieBell70
Summary: Life has not gone according to plan since the war ended, especially not for Harry Potter. However, a new case, an old friend and a terrifyingly familiar enemy might be just the thing to set it all to right. AU in that Tonks survives, also, see pairing.
1. It's Hard Out There For a Hero

Isn't it amazing how life can completely change so quickly? I suppose I ought to be used to it by now. I mean, it's been happening since I was a year old, hasn't it? Bam! You're an orphan. Bam! You're a wizard. Bam! You're a champion for a contest you didn't even enter. Bam! You're a criminal. Bam! You're a hero. Bam! You're an Auror. Well, that one I had been expecting, or at least making plans for, but it did happen rather suddenly. Most Aurors actually finished school, then took years to qualify, rather than months. But their ranks had been so decimated by both the battle and the numbers that had thrown in their lot with the other side that they were quite thrilled to allow me to learn on the job, so to speak. After all, it's what I'd been doing for years.

Yeah, I made some pretty stupid mistakes in the beginning, but the Ministry was so desperate to keep people thinking that everything was 'fine, thank you very much' that they were willing to keep my ineptitude under wraps. No one was allowed to tarnish their golden boy. I don't know what I would have done if not for Ron. Ron can always be counted on to be the person to say what everyone else is thinking but is too afraid to say out loud. And when I was feeling uncertain, I could bounce ideas off him and be sure they'd come back to me sharpened by him. And if that didn't help, there was always Hermione, who wrote to us both every day from her Scottish exile (well, perhaps she wrote a bit more to Ron-hell, Pig used to stagger under the weight of her letters) but I seriously doubt it was all advice to him about his caseload.

But this particular day, Ron was missing, too. He and Hermione were off on their honeymoon. And I was feeling sorry for myself, wondering how they had managed to keep things going for the five years since the battle when Ginny and I had only lasted three. It didn't make sense that they-who still fought like Crups and Kneazles-were still at it like rabbits. Ginny and I could barely stand being in the same room for ten minutes at a time, and we'd hardly had any fights. I suppose I just didn't live up to her expectations of me.

It would have been fine if I hadn't practically been adopted by her family. I didn't want to give up the Weasleys, I loved every single one of them, including Percy the Prat. Hell, I even loved Ginny when she wasn't looking at me as though I'd crawled out from under a rock. I was just a mess. I didn't know how to be what everybody wanted me to be. I'd saved the world, but I was a mediocre Auror. I'd been the gallant knight who slew the dragon, but I was a crap boyfriend. I'd been the Boy-Who-Lived, but I didn't know how to live.

The wedding had been hell for the most part, happy as I was to see them happy. And now, feeling left out and left behind, I was wallowing in my misery. I was on the most boring case in history, looking for idiots trading illegal potions. Dark Wizards were rarer than Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in England these days. The ones left had gone off to the far ends of the earth, knowing that if they were caught in England, they would be lucky to only get a Dementor's kiss.

But there I was, going through piles of paperwork, so bored that I thought I would go mad. And that's when I saw something on the report that brought a horrifying face to my mind. Greyback. A face that still brought chills to the back of my neck. I'd faced the fucking devil incarnate but it was that face that still gave me nightmares (that and Crabbe's burning body, but that's another subject entirely). I'd never forget the way Greyback smelled-like an animal, all musky and sweaty with a bit of eau de rotting meat thrown in for good measure. I'd never forget the gleam of madness in his eyes. Voldemort's eyes had been empty, but Grayback's burned with hatred.

And it wasn't just thinking of him that gave me the willies. It was what he'd done, too. Bill's horribly disfigured face. Lavender's ravaged neck and chest. (Considering the shortage of perfect breasts in the world, it really had seemed a crime to ruin hers. I mean, she wasn't my type and all, but damn, she had fantastic tits. Just saying. Still did, actually. Only-with scars. Which were still sort of hot, actually. But I digress). And, perhaps most of all, Remus, who had looked perfectly normal, (if not a little dull) but inside, he'd been filled with sometimes infuriating self-loathing.

Maybe it was because he'd killed him. Remus, I mean. It was a horrifying thought-if Greyback considered everyone he'd 'turned' as his family, how could he have been so savage about killing him?

Anyway, the potions dealer in question had referred to a 'Leidolf,' which had been one of Greyback's aliases. Leidolf was a common enough name, (in Germany, anyway) but it got the little hairs at the back of my neck sticking up. Five years on the Auror squad had managed to stifle a lot of the instinct that had got me through seven years of people trying to kill me. Now, most of the time, I ignored those little hairs, which used to accompany a burning on my forehead. But this feeling was so strong that I couldn't bring myself to ignore it. I read the report again, this time analysing every word, which was why I looked twice when I saw the name Meloni. Meloni had been one of the personas of Ranallo, one of Greyback's favorite 'children'. Who'd happened to be something of a potions genius. One of Snape's few and far between apprentices, one who'd had to drop out when he'd been attacked by a particular werewolf shortly after his seventh year. So, there was a Meloni and a Leidolf and potions smuggled in from New Orleans. And my gut was telling me it wasn't something to be ignored. Following procedure, I brought it to the attention of Gilbreath, the least imaginative man since the birth of Percy Weasley. He thought it was all rubbish, of course. And he sent me looking for a Welsh connection that turned out to be a series of dead ends, but I couldn't stop thinking about the Death Eater/werewolf angle.

I approached him again, asking if I could just take a few hours to look into some of Greyback's previously known associates. I got turned down flat. As I sat at home alone that night, with only Kreacher and a bottle of Ogden's for company, I stewed about it. They'd never found Greyback's body. It was assumed that Neville had actually killed him, but even he'd said he hadn't used a killing curse, that he didn't have it in him. Or rather, he would have had it in him if it had been Bellatrix, but she'd already been taken down by my almost-mother-in-law.

There had been a lot of blood, especially when Ron had stomped on his nose for good measure. And the curse Neville had used was nothing to sneeze at, having been taught to him by his Grandmother during the Christmas hols that last year. It was old magic, almost dark, but technically legal. Eyewitnesses said he'd howled in agony, frothed at the mouth and went very, very still. But no body. There had been so many bodies to deal with, and not all of them had made their way to their family's resting place of choice. It had been assumed that someone who'd loved someone who'd been turned by him had taken him home to do terrible things to his corpse.

Could he have survived? Probably not. All those rumors of Snape having somehow survived had come to nothing in the end. But then again, at least one person whom I had presumed dead had ended up walking out of St. Mungos on her own two feet six months after the battle. And that person happened to live in America these days. I was no expert on North American geography, but it certainly looked on the map as though she wasn't that far away from New Orleans. And she'd certainly be interested to hear that her husband's killer was alive and well and doing his part to corrupt Britain's magical youth.

The following morning, I impulsively requested a leave of absence from the Auror Department. Gilbreath wheezed and sputtered and threatened to sack me, but I just looked him dead in the eye and said, "Go ahead."

I could see it written all over his face-all the political fallout for being the Head Auror who'd lost the saviour of the wizarding world, the one person that had everyone sleeping better in their beds because they knew that he was out there protecting them. And with a sigh, he signed my request. Within 36 hours, I had set foot on foreign soil for the very first time in my life. It was the lightest I had felt in years.


	2. The New World

I'd spent four days in New Orleans, and I still didn't even know if I liked the place. It seemed to balance on a knife point of jubilation and despair. Some parts of it were stunningly beautiful, and other parts were completely depressing. Unfortunately, the nature of my task required me to spend more time in the sordid parts of town. I got nowhere asking about Meloni or Leidolf or any of the other names I'd heard them use. People here, while initially warm and hospitable, seemed to shutter themselves off when I started asking too many questions. I felt completely out of my element. I was usually pretty good at getting people to open up and talk to me, but here, even when we were speaking the same language, the art of conversation was entirely different, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. And then there was the French, which I knew enough of to translate on the signs I saw all over town, but which sounded completely different when spoken. I tried to take notes, and stayed up late at night attempting to translate them with my trusty Auror handbook. And it was by doing that that I came up with my one and only decent clue.

_Loup-garou._ Hermione would have picked it up right away, remembering it from our third year Defense class. The witch who'd uttered the word (under her breath) had been particularly nervous, fiddling with the bright yellow scarf around her neck. Something had bothered me about that scarf, and I found myself wishing for a pensieve in order to examine my memory of our conversation more closely. At the time, I'd chalked her mannerisms up to a Pepper-up addiction, which was growing more common than you'd think. People started out using it to party just 'that much more' after the war. In fact, that had been one of George's more worrisome coping mechanisms. He got tired of people hovering early on, and discovered that the best way to discourage that sort of behaviour was to put on a happy face. George being George, he had the resources to accomplish this chemically, and there was a period of about six months where I don't think I had a conversation with him where he wasn't stoned out of his mind. It finally took Lee's threatening to leave to knock some sense into him.

But, that was a different story altogether and one that would take too long to tell here. About the girl in the apothecary. She c_ould_ have been a Pepperhead. She was painfully thin (lots of people, girls in particular, took it initially to lose weight) and her eyes were glazed with something unnatural. And the scarf could have been her way of disguising love bites, or bruises from an abusive lover, or even a tattoo she hadn't wanted her boss to see. But the yellow scarf had seemed so out of place in the dingy, dusty shop. It made me think of something Lavender might have worn, though she'd have worn it to draw the eye to her battle scars, rather than cover them up. Which had me thinking about werewolf scars. And the fact that she'd whispered 'Loup-garou' and crossed herself when I showed her the potions I confiscated from my suspect the week before, back in London. "We don't sell those here," she'd insisted. "We are a respectable establishment."

I found the place again easily enough the next day (located between a strip club and a massage parlour, very respectable indeed) but the girl was not in. When I showed the same items to her boss (I think it was her boss, only an Apothecary could smell quite that...musty) his blasé demeanor changed rapidly. He practically threw me out the door. "I do _not_ deal with monsters," he roared, and when I tried to explain that I was trying to help, he hit me with a flash of purple that had me heading nearly to the opposite side of town before I realized what he'd done.

I tried three times to go back, but the old bastard was far stronger than I'd have thought, and his Revulsion Jinx was one of the most powerful I'd ever encountered. Clearly, I was going to need help. Preferably someone who knew the area better than I did.

Of course, that meant that I needed to do a little shopping, because I hadn't seen my godson in three years at least, and it wouldn't do to show up empty handed. Not that I hadn't sent some pretty cool gifts for his birthdays and Christmas, but it always made me feel good to shop for him—maybe it was overcompensating for my own gift-deprived childhood and trying to make up for it by spoiling another orphan?

Clearly, I was bollocks at interpreting maps. I mean, I'd known it would be _big,_ but there really was nothing that could have prepared me for how spread out America would be. After two Portkeys, several unexpected detours (Florida is really, really humid and I wouldn't recommend picking what looks to be a nice spot on a map unless you actively want to come face to face with a hungry alligator. Or a large, talking mouse wearing white gloves), and the unexpected splinching loss of half my chest hair, I found myself walking up a country lane to a cottage that looked as though it had been designed by Lewis Carroll. I heard a noise to my left and spotted a head of mad turquoise hair that could have only belonged to my godson. He was buzzing around on a toy broom—one, in fact, that I think I had sent him—chasing a terrified dragonfly.

His gap-toothed grin practically took up his whole face. It was a smile I had only seen on his father once, and in a memory at that. For a long moment, I stood there, transfixed. This was a fair bit different from the way that I felt when I caught sight of Bill and Fleur's little girl. I liked Bill and Fleur well enough, (Fleur in small doses) but this boy felt more like family, in fact—I'd come uncomfortably close to having to raise the poor thing when I was just a kid myself. I saw him and I thought about everything that had happened before he was born, how a war had brought two people that probably wouldn't have looked twice at each other together, how an irresistible force had met an immovable object—what with her unshakable determination to give him happiness and his unwavering determination to sacrifice his happiness to his condition. It almost seemed fitting that he'd died a martyr and she'd cheated death by refusing to let it take her. And here was the living, breathing result of all that anguish, cheerfully unaware of all the impossible things that needed to happen in order to bring him into existence, and he was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen in my life.

"Well, if it isn't Harry Sodding Potter, as I live and breathe, standing in my garden."

I spun around at the sound of Tonks' voice. She was kneeling in a bed of snapdragons, brandishing a miniature hoe in a similar manner to the way I'd seen her wield a wand. Not that she seemed to be threatening me with it, exactly, but I wouldn't have wanted to be in the position of the dandelion I spotted near her knees. She had her hair sort of a silvery white, and it suited her, especially as the sun seemed to be glinting off the top of her head. But most of all, I noticed her smile, which had always managed to brighten up even the gloom of Grimmauld Place and now had me grinning in response.

"Wotcher, Tonks," I found myself saying, and her smile widened as she rose to her feet.

"Everything all right, then? Or did you need to get away from the hero groupies?"

I laughed, but I wasn't sure how to respond. I mean, there had been a girl or two (or twenty) who'd paid far more attention to me after the war than they had before, but I'd been too focused on Ginny at the time to even consider it. And now that Ginny was out of the picture, I found the best way to judge if a girl and I were going to get on is how little she did react when I told her my name. Or maybe I was just worried about reading about my most embarrassing sexual proclivities on the front page of the Prophet. I decided to ignore it. "No, I'm here on a case. And to see Teddy, of course. And you."

She raised her eyebrow at the last bit. "So, I take it the Aurors haven't managed to ruin your faith in humanity yet? Good for you, Harry."

"Is that what happened to you?" I asked.

"Ah, no, not really. Or not just them, anyway. Forget I said anything and come over here and give me a proper hug. You may be the big damn hero to everybody else, but to me, you're still the skinny, spotty teenager with the messy room who tried to pretend he wasn't checking out my arse."

"I didn—" I could feel my face heating up as I walked toward her outstretched arms. "I suppose I did, at that." The back of her shirt was covered with sweat, but she still smelled unbelievably good, like sunshine bottled up as perfume. She always had.

"So then, has the Ministry found out about the prostitution ring I'm running here? Are you coming to take me away in chains?"

"As if I could," I said. "You'd probably knock me flat on my arse if I tried."

"I could, and don't you forget it," she said, holding out her hoe threateningly. I felt the tension in my gut loosening up a bit. It occurred to me that Tonks had always been able to do that to people. No matter how bad things got, she always had something funny to say to lighten up the situation. Sort of like Ron, who I was missing more than I realised.

"It's a really cool place you have here," I said, looking around.

"Isn't it lovely? You can thank the Ministry for it. Sort of a pension to make up for Remus losing his life 'in the service of the people of Magical Britain.' He was worth more to them dead than alive. Not that they'd ever actually _employ_ a lycanthrope, even now."

I felt sick to my stomach at the thought. I had been rather disgusted at some of the gestures of that sort that went into effect after the war. As if the Ministry itself was responsible for the Order when they'd been so eager to distance themselves from the organization long before Voldemort took over.

And as much as I admired Kingsley Shacklebolt, even as Minister he still hadn't managed to improve the lives of people like Remus. Officially, discrimination in employment was prohibited. Which meant that it was easier for Muggleborns and people with battle-related disabilities to get decent jobs after the war, but for former House-Elves and Goblins and in particular, Werewolves, people somehow always managed to find a 'more qualified' person to fill the job. The House Elves had people like Hermione on their side and Molly Weasley had done miracles with her campaign to make sure that all of the Lycan children whose parents had been killed by Greyback got good homes, but the adults were sort of screwed.

Part of the blame went to Greyback himself, for terrifying the entire country. It gave people an excuse to hold on to their fears and prejudices. 'See, look what they do! They want to take over the country and fill it with monsters. They won't be happy until we're all monsters.' Not that it mattered that people like Remus and some of those he'd brought back with him from his time with the pack had actually protected them from_ real _monsters like the Lestranges.

I couldn't help but look over at Teddy. As a child of a well-known werewolf, he was in sort of a precarious position. I didn't blame Tonks for an instant for taking him somewhere where nobody knew about his father. But at the same time, it made me angry. He should have grown up as the child of a war hero. He should have been able to wear his heritage proudly. "He's grown up a lot," I observed.

"Hasn't he?" she said, looking over at him with tears in her eyes. Maybe they were tears of pride, but I suspected that my showing up here brought back a lot of memories of home and friends and her life with Remus. I hadn't meant to dredge it all up for her.

"He's brilliant," I said. "And I've missed you both."

Tonks smiled and put her arm around me. "Well then, I suppose it's about time you come in and we have ourselves a catch up. I've got a jug of chilled tea made. That's how they drink it here. On ice, no milk, and ridiculously sweet, y'all. And god help you if you don't have any on hand to welcome the neighbors."

"Oi, Teddy!" she called out. "Time to come in for lunch. And it's high time you got to know your godfather."


End file.
